This summit will cover the latest trading and technology challenges affecting the buy-side in an ever-changing financial and regulatory landscape, as well as innovative strategies for optimizing trade execution, managing risk and increasing operational efficiency, while keeping costs to a minimum.

WatersTechnology and Sell-Side Technology are pleased to present the 7th annual North American Trading Architecture Summit.
Bringing together technologists, architects, software developers and data center managers from the financial community to discuss the latest issues in trading technology.

Hosted by WatersTechnology, the Waters Rankings voting will be open to every investment firm, hedge fund, and exchange across the globe and will give recognition to technology and service providers for their offerings.

The aim of the awards is to recognize the leading technologies and vendors in their area of expertise, through an auditable and transparent methodology underpinned by the input and experience of six judges - four buy-side-focused technology consultants and Buy-Side Technology's editors.

This white paper considers grid's place in a cloud-enabled world, addresses options for optimizing onsite system performance, and discusses alternative on-premises solutions such as hardware acceleration and supercomputers.

Stress testing and scenario modeling is essential for any financial institution (FI) that wants to survive market shocks and increased regulatory scrutiny. This report tracks developments in the marketplace, suggests best practice and provides an overview of the available risk technology support systems.

Goodbye and Good Riddance

It wasn't long ago that risk was managed on a piecemeal, after-the-fact basis, where firms sought to establish their value-at-risk-the risk measure du jour in the pre-financial crisis dispensation-based on positions they had taken in the market the previous day. This VAR number, expressed in dollars and cents, had, at best, a limited influence on firms' trading strategies, impelling appreciable numbers of risk professionals to question the appropriateness and reliability of such measures in recent years.

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But the notion of managing one's risk exposure, and specifically who was at risk from whom, changed in 2008with the high-profile failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, as market participants faced the sobering realization that no organization was too big to fail and that buy-side firms, traditionally considered by the sell side to be the weakest link in the risk chain, were no longer the black sheep of the industry. This perception led to significant tightening of risk management practices on both sides of the industry, as firms sought to extrapolate their counterparty, asset class and country risk exposure in ever greater detail and shrinking timeframes, rendering previously acceptable risk practices obsolete almost overnight. It was a case of out with the old and in with the new-and not a moment too soon. Goodbye and good riddance, I say.

While the notion of real-time risk management might have been entertained by the more forward-thinking organizations prior to the financial crisis, the technology simply wasn't available to them to support their aspirations. But that is no longer the case, as technology vendors-both hardware and software-have stepped up in recent years to provide financial firms with the wherewithal to support their data management, and, by association, their risk management endeavors. Now, close-to-real-time pre-trade risk management and on-the-fly credit value adjustments are not only realistic goals- they're also achievable.